


Seeing in Black and White

by MoonSilverSprite



Series: Cold Case [1]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Child Murder, Class Differences, Justice, Kidnapping, Murder, Police Procedural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 22:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonSilverSprite/pseuds/MoonSilverSprite
Summary: A cold case begins to heat up as the team investigate whether a missing child was snatched by a pedophile ring. However, it seems the key to solving the mystery is something far more simpler.





	Seeing in Black and White

**Although inspired in part by a true incident, the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.**

_27_ th May 2004  
NYPD Station  
5.48pm

“One of the most despicable men on Earth,” Fin Tutola remarked as he threw down the folder onto the desk, “Michael Edwards is suspected of up to ten murders in the city and beyond.”

Stabler nodded as he remembered the case. “One of my first,” he muttered, swallowing a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, “arrested the guy ten years ago. So why’s the folder out now, Fin?”

Fin sat down and swallowed, leafing through. “The mother of one of Edwards’ possible victims asked for my help in getting attention.”

“How many did he kill, again?” Benson asked.

Stabler crossed his arms, stood up from his desk and walked over to where Fin was sitting, the piece of paper with Edwards’ mugshot already out. “Four that we know of. Edwards and his gang – the Filthy Four – slaughtered four girls after kidnapping them from the streets. All in New York, or, in the case of Sonya Miller, from a small town upstate.”

Benson glanced at the four photographs, all in black-and-white, pulled from the folder. Reading aloud, the cogs in her brain whirred as she recollected the incident. It had made national headlines. Even _international_.

“Sonya Miller, aged eight years old, abducted as she went to a carnival on 10th July 1992. Her bicycle was recovered by the side of a gate.” She examined the yearbook picture of the girl, happy, smiling, some of her teeth still growing in.

Teeth that never would grow in.

“Only victim that was never found,” Stabler grimaced, “but Edwards confessed to killing her. Her denim jacket and pumps were found in his house, though.”

“These pervs get worse every year,” Benson sighed, running a hand through her hair, “Rebecca Green, aged fourteen, had run away from a foster home in the Bronx in late June 1993. Edwards says that the group killed her in early September, unsure of the date, but believes it was Columbus Day. Tilda Roberts, aged seven, only African-American victim, abducted from Queens as she came home from school on 20th December 1993, last day of the semester.”

“And Emily Stuart, eleven years old,” Finn turned the sheet over to view the final picture, “snatched from South Beach, Staten Island, on April 3rd 1994\. The bodies of Rebecca, Tilda and Emily were uncovered near Cream Hill Lake, Connecticut, on April 30th.”

“I remember that,” Benson nodded, “a parking ticket lead to Edwards, the house was searched, he goes down for four non-consecutive life sentences.”

“And it’s apparently not enough,” Stabler huffed, “the public are crying for his blood.”

Benson rested her head on her hand. “Fin, you said that a mom wants to talk about her kid?”

Fin nodded, eyes still on the folder. He pulled out another sheet, this one with a picture of a smiling African-American girl in colour.

“Mindy Turner, aged ten, disappeared on Valentine’s 1994. Girl goes to the New York Aquarium, CCTV shows her leaving at 4.40pm, supposed to be home in Gravesend at 4.55pm, never came home. Two months later Edwards is arrested, Mindy’s mother is shown some of the little girls’ things found at his house, says a purple _My Little Pony_ is hers.”

“The mom made a huge fuss about it, too,” Stabler pointed out, “said she knew it was hers because it had red pen marks on the front right leg. Poor mom never found her kid.”

Olivia was in the debriefing room later when she flicked through the other folders, belonging to the other four members of the wicked gang.

Harley Richardson, Luke Arnold, Thomas Wolfe. Sick animals, all with foul intentions, illegal photography and criminal records. Wolfe, however, was the youngest at only twenty-one during the trial, his prior arrest being for a drunken argument.

Wolfe had been a rent boy for the gang back when they began, in 1987. Doing the math, Olivia felt as if she would vomit. Then when the group had said they preferred girls, Thomas had offered girls from the foster home where he lived.

Most of the gang’s victims had been from that foster home. But when Wolfe grew up and no longer had any access to the home, it became useless.

That same year, 1991, was the year that their first presumed victim, Carmen Martine Hernandez, aged fourteen, had vanished as she came off from a train in Manhattan. Apparently, Harley Richardson, then aged thirty-two, resembled the sketch of a man following Hernandez. Olivia recalled the headlines – _Vanished on the Fourth of July_.

Carmen was still missing. The blonde, blue-eyed girl didn’t look like a Mexican, which was probably why people were so focused on her, even all these years later.

Another child, Josephine Hart, had been only nine when she disappeared from South Beach, Staten Island, on April 29th 1992\. Everyone knew where they were that day, the NYPD had said when they spoke to the public; it was the day Rodney King was killed in Los Angeles.

But Josephine was found dead, nine months later in January 1993, upstate in forestry near Verbank. Found by a dairy farmer, Josephine had been too decomposed to figure out how she had died. But like the three girls found years later, her clothes were neatly folded underneath her and some were missing.

The other two girls seemingly linked to the gang had been off the radar of any police or media. Dominique Cassidy, aged fifteen, had disappeared from her foster home in Queens – the same one that Wolfe had lived at – before Christmas 1992. A stout, squat, Guatemalan girl, Dominique still remained missing.

The other, Jess Griffin, was aged twelve and had disappeared on November 25th 1993, Thanksgiving, from her home in one of the grottiest parts of Queens. Her body had been found in a forest near Millbrook, upstate. That was in 2000, several years after she had gone.

Like Mindy Turner, Jess was only included due to the close geographic proximities.

Olivia then looked at the four killers’ profiles.

Michael Edwards, born in Rochester in 1960, had been in prison between 1978 and 1988 for burglary and assault with intent to harm. Released on parole for good behaviour, he had moved to Brooklyn where his sister had resided, then took up a job as an interior painter.

Harley Richardson, born in Queens in 1948, was the only one with a criminal record towards children. Arrested for abuse of a child under thirteen years in 1965, he went in until 1972. When he came out, against all the odds he was allowed to live a block and a half away from Wolfe’s orphanage.

Luke Arnold, born 1963, had come from Alabama. He claimed to have molested between forty-five and sixty-seven girls there before the age of twenty-three, but none of them ever came forward to police. His only record had been stealing from a store, aged seven, taking candy bars. Meeting Harley at his job as a gardener, the two hit off. They had also let Edwards into their secret and started up the gang, later joined by Wolfe as soon as he could drive.

It sickened Olivia. While it seemed to be a good idea for lonely people to make friends, doing it in order to assault, then to abduct, assault and kill children was beyond human comprehension.

 _24_ th May 2004  
Attica Prison, NY  
5.27pm

Fin sat across from Michael Edwards in the visitors’ room. Edwards seemed very different from his mugshot, taken a decade earlier. He was a bit more muscular, with a small scar underneath his right eye. He also seemed despondent, tired of people constantly asking questions.

Fin and Edwards were accompanied by a guard, who stood at the back of the room. He didn’t need to take part, he only needed to assist in case something went wrong.

Fin then pointed to the picture of Mindy on the table. “Mindy’s mom wants to know where she is, Edwards,” he tried to speak in as neutral a voice as possible, but rage was boiling inside, “it’s been a decade. At least let her be buried knowing where her child is.”

Edwards sighed, leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “How many times do I need to tell you pigs?” he groaned. “I didn’t take Mindy. I’d remember her.”

“Remember her how?” Fin asked, raising an eyebrow. He had guessed the answer.

Edwards shrugged. “Mostly took white kids, didn’t we?”

“You took Tilda Roberts,” Fin argued, “she looked a lot like Mindy, didn’t she? Could have been sisters.”

Edwards grumbled.

“You cops don’t know that we took Mindy. Sure, we took girls. But we favoured the orphanage, you have to remember.”

“We also know that you can’t have buried all the girls where you did,” Fin pointed out, handing more photos across the table, “Carmen, Dominique, they’re missing too.”

Edwards looked closely at Carmen’s photo. As he had done many times, he gave a small little curl at the corner of his mouth, before it disappeared quickly. “Never would have taken her for a Mexican.”

“They’re not all dark,” Fin told Edwards, who honestly didn’t appear as if he wouldn’t care, “not that would have bothered you.”

He then asked Edwards, “You got a type? The others? Any specific little kid on your checklist whenever you went to the orphanage?”

Edwards slammed the photo down onto the table. “I already told investigators. Don’t you lot _ever_ double-check?”

“We do,” Fin frowned, “you all prefer girls. Arnold likes them on the older side. Wolfe likes ones he can easily control and he’s not a big guy. Richardson takes what he can get. You like orphans.”

“You want me to slip up,” Edwards nodded at him, “I had forty-four hours of interrogation and I never slipped up. I’m trained, like you. Dad used to beat me, told you all that. Looked for even the slightest slip-up, learnt how to fool others.”

Fin had seen this as many times as he dared to count. He then asked his final question.

“You do know that you could get an early parole if you lead police to other victims. Namely Sonya Miller. Just take a couple of days to think about it.”

 _24_ th May 2004  
Brooklyn  
7pm

“My Mindy used to go to the aquarium by herself all the time.” Jan Turner said to the group.

Olivia was standing at the back of the Mothers Against Early Parolees group, which met in Brooklyn every month. A place for mothers to get stuff off their chests, to mourn and to support each other, Cragen had asked if she could go along to try and speak to Jan. Just in case Jan could give any information that the original investigation had missed.

“I never thought – I never thought that she’d be in danger. She’s a streetwise kid – _was_ a streetwise kid. Sorry…” Jan wiped her nose on the sleeve of her duffel coat. “I’ve got five kids, you know. The youngest born after she vanished. We never had a good job, Mike and I. I was a grocery cashier, he was a bouncer. How could we support all the kids? We didn’t have money for a bus pass. She went to the aquarium to go in this school program. I didn’t want her to have to walk the six blocks back by herself, but she did.”

It seemed to Olivia that Jan was too focused on the financial issue that the family had been in more than how much she loved her daughter. But, Olivia told herself, different parents act in different ways. She could be blaming herself for how she didn’t have enough money for a pass.

“I miss her so much.” Jan was wailing, holding her hands over her eyes and face. The mother of a murdered shopkeeper put her arm around Jan and held her.

Afterwards, Olivia asked Jan, “I’m sorry, but I need to ask you a few questions.”

Almost immediately, Jan put a hand up. “I’m asked all the time if I was sure she would have come home. And I said, ‘ _yes_ ’. God! Don’t you pay attention?”

She started to push past Olivia, but Olivia sternly answered, “I just wanted to know if you’ve heard from her.”

Jan raised an eyebrow. “She’s dead, lady.”

She had seemed so nasty about it that Olivia was taken aback for a moment. When she regained her bearings, Olivia asked, “I meant, have you ever considered the fact that Mindy might have run away?”

“She was ten,” Jan snorted, “and tiny. She wouldn’t have lasted.”

“Well, had she ever said anything about her real dad?” Olivia knew that Jan had never actually been married to Mindy’s real father. Mike was only the father of the youngest two, now three, and that Mindy’s other siblings had different fathers as well. Jan said herself that she thought Mindy was mixed-race and the girl had certainly had a lighter tone than her siblings, but Jan had never said anything about Mindy’s dad.

“Wouldn’t have a clue.” Jan shrugged.

Olivia thanked her for her time and then left. But she was suspicious. Jan had not acted like any other parent Olivia had dealt with. She was too cruel, too snappy, too arrogant. True, _every_ parent acted differently. But the way Jan had talked about the investigation as if it were an inconvenience had been strange.

 _26_ th May 2004  
Pond Mountain Recreational Area  
2.48pm

The crew were digging in a small area where Edwards was pointing at. Cuffed and in his prison jumpsuit, the burly convict stood out a mile.

Stabler was on the scene, talking into his police radio. “You sure that Edwards said the girls are here?” he asked, glancing about at the men digging into the soil in front of the trees.

“He said it was by Kent,” Fin replied over the radio, “he drew a map and this is roughly where it was. I just hope he’s not lying.”

“Or the soil washed them away after a decade,” Elliott murmured.

Then there was a shout from one of the men. “I think we found something!”

The words that police always want to hear – and sometimes fear.

Sticking out from the soil were the leg bones of something, _someone_ , small. Stabler sighed as he placed the radio near his lips. “I think we found one of the kids.”

 _27_ th May 2004  
NYPD Medical Examiner’s Office  
3.23am

Warner had three tables laid out with the skeletons on top of them. Her job was always hard but when it was kids on the autopsy table, it hit hard. Looking up as Elliott and Olivia entered the room, she walked over to them.

“We wanted to know if you’d finished the autopsies yet,” Olivia asked, “since you’ve had a long night.”

Warner nodded and gestured to the first skeleton. “I haven’t been able to work out a cause of death simply by looking at them, so I would suggest that maybe their throats were cut. Now,” she carefully held her hands at the pelvic area, “the pelvis is already widened, meaning that this is a woman. A young one, by the looks of it, as it is wide, but not as wide as a full-grown adult’s.”

Then towards the other two. “The second is very similar to the first one. The third skeleton is still pretty small, so determining a gender would be hard. But I can say that most of the bones were still growing and the mouth still has a lot of teeth. The clothing underneath the three of them would link to the three as well.”

Olivia looked at the clipboard.

“These match to the clothes last seen being worn by Carmen Martine Hernandez and Dominique Cassidy. But the labels on the younger skeleton are too worn to find a name, if there was one,” she read, “I’ll double-check the clothes reported missing with the known cases. Do you have any clue how old the skeleton was?”

Warner nodded. “Between ten and twenty years underground, but I’d assume that doesn’t help.”

Stabler replied, “Not really.”

Warner added, “The child is from Caucasian background. That’s a definite. Not any sign of African or Asian heritage, at least not in the few previous generations.”

Stabler muttered, “So that could rule out Mindy Turner.” Then he raised his head. “Thank you for your help. We’ll look again at the clothing description.”

 _27_ th May 2004  
Turner Household  
Gravesend

Both Mindy Turner and Sonya Miller’s mothers had just been shown photographs of the clothes. Olivia had been at the Turner residence when Stabler had called her on the phone. Apparently, Sonya’s mother was unsure.

As soon as Olivia sat down on the couch and handed the photograph to Jan, the woman immediately started squawking like a bird.

“That’s her coat! I’d know her little green coat anywhere! You have to believe me, Officer,” she grabbed Olivia’s arm with both hands, unnerving her, “she got that coat for her tenth birthday. I was going to try and get her a pink one, the colour she wanted, on her eleventh, but it was two months away. I just know it has to be hers. Who did this? Was it that gang?”

“Right, you’re going to need to calm down,” Olivia was struggling to wonder how the skeleton could be Mindy’s if the autopsy said it was of a white girl, but if Jan recognized the clothes, perhaps they were mislaid by the Filthy Four and buried with Sonya, “I just need to make sure you –“

“THEY’RE HERS!” Jan Turner almost screamed at Olivia. A young man came around the door and Jan leapt up and hugged him awkwardly. “They found Mindy, I’m telling you, Jon, they found Mindy!”

Her son stepped away and raised an eyebrow, as if sceptical. He noticed Olivia on the couch and swallowed. He looked back towards his mother and asked, “Are you certain?”

Jan nodded. “They said the gang killed her.”

“We didn’t _say_ that –“ Olivia stood up, but Jan was unstoppable.

“I need to call everyone.” She told her son as she headed into the kitchen.

Jon sat down on the couch, slowly, beginning to shake a little. He seemed frightened, Olivia presumed. Then Jon managed to whisper, “Did you find her in Breezy Point Tip?”

The hairs on the back of her neck stood as she asked, “Why do you ask?”

“I –“ Jon looked terrified. He kept looking back to the kitchen, where Jan was talking happily on the phone.

He swallowed and squeezed his eyes. “Officer Benson, I was eight. You need to understand – I was scared of her. I _am_ scared of her.”

Olivia slowly spoke to him, “Whatever happened, Jon, you need to make it right.”

He then murmured, after closing the door with his hand, “Mom killed her.”

Jon revealed his story. “Mom wanted – she wanted to have money. She told me a lot later – that when a child vanishes – people pay them attention, get their story for the news. They get paid for telling their story. She was going to say that people – people don’t care when a poor black kid vanishes, but if it goes on for a long time, she could milk it. Dad wouldn’t leave her, people would share their things with her, she’d tell the story to everyone who would listen. The gang coming along was a coincidence. Mindy never owned a My Little Pony. She thought – that if Mindy was attached to known criminals – people definitely would look at her.”

Olivia knew this was the most disgusting thing she could imagine a mother doing to her child. And in Olivia’s line of work and what she had seen, that was definitely a remarkable blemish on her case history.

“Where is Mindy?” Olivia swallowed.

“Mindy’s in Breezy Point Tip. Mom took me there. She stuffed her inside a green sleeping bag and dumped her between the long grass and the trees.”

Olivia called Cragen and walked outside. “Cragen, just got news on the Mindy Turner case. You’d never believe what I’ve just uncovered.”

 _28_ th May 2004  
Breezy Point Tip  
12.40pm

“I never thought we’d find her in a spot her mom left her,” Fin sighed, as he overlooked the recovery team bring out a filthy sleeping bag, “we were so certain the gang killed her.”

“That’s what Jan wanted us to believe,” Olivia sighed, “parents are the most likely to kill a child, but there were no signs.”

“Do you think she planned to kill her, or it just happened and she took a chance?” Fin asked.

Shrugging, Olivia replied, “Maybe she didn’t even plan on killing _Mindy_. She would have murdered any of them. I feel sick at these sorts of people.”

Then she asked, “Any luck on the clothes?”

“A DNA test is being done on the bones. But I’d say that it’s likely that the victim is Sonya,” Fin said, “everything else makes it likely.”

Looking back at the medical officer’s vehicle as it began to drive to the station, Olivia thought to herself about Mindy.

Mindy Turner had been failed in life, failed in death.

**Partly inspired by the Dirty Dozen case, and the Shannon Matthews case.**


End file.
